“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

Those immortal words from our Declaration of Independence, were written by Thomas Jefferson, explaining from whence government draws its power, and what should happen when government usurps that power. It has, in spades! The electorate has lost all power under our system, and it is incumbent upon each and every one of us to do something about it.

I have been preaching on various boards and forums for months now that the only viable way to preserve the middle class in the United States, and remove the yoke of corporate oppression that has gobbled-up the entire government is for the public to participate in mass civil disobedience, general strikes, removing money from national banking institutions, and some other things. Mostly, I have been taken for some kind of crank or eccentric, most people seeming to want to do the easy thing and stay within the system, hoping for some “change you can believe in.” Well, our experience is proving that this attitude of “lesser of two evils” is nothing but magical thinking.

I will be the first to admit that beyond my few suggestions, I had nothing further to offer beyond my willingness to do what I could to support such efforts. Now, however, an organization has been brought to my attention that has a complete plan, even down to suggested legislation, and recommended means of implementing the plan. The website is: http://www.resetbutton2011.org/ and here is a brief synopsis of the plan from the website:

Phase I of The Reset Button is true election reform, which puts the sovereignty over and control of elections into the hands of the citizen electorate – for the first time in the history of our nation. Phase I of The Reset Button calls for one US Constitutional amendment – Amendment XXVIII (Election Reform Amendment) – to be ratified immediately, and one law – the Election Reform Act of 2011 – to be passed immediately, in order for the citizens of the United States to gain sovereignty and democratic rule in the United States of America. Once Phase I is accomplished, Phase II of The Reset Button outlines major, simultaneous changes in governance, to steer the United States to a course of integrity and away from collusion, to real peace and away from imperialistic and militaristic and predatory behavior, to sovereignty over and control of healthful food, air, water, and healthcare, to a world-changing embracing of non-polluting “free energy” technologies and the accompanying paradigm shift from scarcity to abundance, to a blended ideology of social democracy for our needs and restrained capitalism for our desires beyond our needs, to social, economic, and environmental harmony, benevolence, and justice for all.

Please read the entire The Reset Button document – it will probably only take a couple of hours. You need to know the details, not just skim over it. You need to know the document well enough to literally “be the leader of the movement” at any point, because we are all the leaders of the movement. The Reset Button movement is headless – we are, each and every one of us, the leader, the head of the movement. Holding the concept, “rule by rules, not by rulers”, we don’t have, don’t need, and don’t want a singular powerful or charismatic leader, or a celebrity spokesperson. Instead, with The Reset Button, we have a strong document that defines our movement, a strong blueprint to build from, a strong plan and call to action for gaining sovereignty and self-governance – for the first time in our lives.

Maybe it is a little bit scary to move forward and support The Reset Button movement with your heart and soul, but think how frightening the alternative is. We have been steadily losing any control whatsoever over our future, losing our rights, losing our freedoms, losing our sovereignty. The giant national and multinational corporations and the giant national and international banks now have everything they need to utterly dominate our lives, legally, through buying elections (with the decision in the Supreme Court case that sounds as if George Orwell wrote the title, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.) The corporations and banks are now poised to complete their takeover of the US government and its citizens. At this defining moment in history, we either immediately stiffen our backbones, stop them before the 2012 elections, change the rules, and hit the reset button – or quite likely, we will never again have a chance for sovereignty, self-determination, and self-governance.

Our strength is in numbers. We need everyone to pull together and, as the US Constitution says, “…to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”, and make the changes outlined in The Reset Button happen. Millions of voices in unison demanding – and finally achieving – a government of the people, for the people, and by the people. We will succeed.

Please give it a read, and forward it to your friends, and paste the link in the boards and forums you visit. The oligarchy is NOT going to relinquish control without a fight, but they cannot continue to survive without us, if we remain united.

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”

People ask me, from time-to-time what led us to sell our primary residence and vehicle, divest ourselves of most of our possessions, leave our children and grandchildren behind, and move to an area most feel is more instable and dangerous than the one we left. Well, the short answer that I think we would both agree upon is simply “affordability.” Beyond that, the underlying reasons, at least for me, lie much deeper, and have to do with both politics and culture, and I’m going to be speaking only for myself here, my dear wife’s reasons are her own, and are not for me to reveal, at least not in this forum.

In Atlas Shrugged, the sociopathic authoress Ayn Rand created a dystopic, upside-down fantasy world where the heroes, the intrepid “captains of industry,” the men (and woman) “of brains,” were being victimized and systematically looted of all they possessed by the so-called “looters,” (read “Liberals”) who ran the country and the world. These “looters,” men with names like Kip Chalmers, Cuffy Meigs, Chick Morrison, and Wesley Mouch, knew full well what they were doing, and what the final results would inevitably be. They all had well-stocked, secure, private, hide-a-ways they could run too when the world had nothing left to loot. Our heroes, on the other hand, under the leadership of one John Galt, decided to rid the world of the looters by withholding their services, and bringing all commerce and industry to a halt.

When their efforts began to be successful, and the country became untenable for the looters, or anyone else, the “men (and woman) of brains” hid-out in a canyon in the Rocky Mountains most of them referred to as “Galt’s Gulch.” They waited there until no further activity was detected outside, then they would presumably return and recreate America as an Objectivist country, where free, unfettered capitalism would be allowed to flourish, and create a utopian society based upon the philosophy of “I’ve got mine, the hell with you!”

In reality, as many Americans are beginning to discover, the looters Rand described in her boring tome really do exist, but they aren’t at all the people she expected they would be. We have been systematically looted, all of us, but not by the “Liberals,” or by the Conservatives specifically either, for that matter, but by the very people who Rand chose as the victims in her narrative – the so-called “men of brains!” As Rand predicted, the entire government is indeed in thrall – but it’s to the corporations themselves, who also control the media and most means of communication, and not those who would redistribute their wealth. Oh, wealth is being redistributed alright, but upwards, to the top one or two percent, from what used to be the middle class, who have now joined the great American underclass. Just like Rand’s looters, these corporate CEO’s, upper management types, Wall Street fund managers, and the rest all have their secret walled hideaways, where they will be safe from the rest of us, and the ravages of climate change.

Make no mistake, whatever they are trying to tell us through their cable and print “news” outlets, they know damn well that global climate change is real, and imminent, and that there will be no escape for most of us from the widespread chaos of relocations and starvation. They know that the dollar will eventually collapse, and they have provided for their children and for their children’s children, leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves.

This is not new information; some of our best remaining journalists, like Chris Hedges and others have been screaming it for quite some time, even before the 2008 election. I admit to have been completely taken-in by the slickly-packaged Obama brand, even before the primary season hit full swing in the late winter and early spring of 2008. I was an early volunteer for the Obama campaign, and spent countless hours both on the street and on the phone to help deliver North Carolina both during the primary and the general. I did this in the face of considerable personal abuse, as well, as I was a precinct captain in one of the reddest districts of the state.

Looking back, I think I so much wanted him to be what he said he was that I overlooked obvious clues to the truth that were hidden in plain sight, only like the religious, I saw only what I wanted to see, and ignored, or simply discounted the rest. Always a dangerous thing to do!

After the election, there was that bit of euphoria which lasted right up to the magic-man’s first important appointments. Larry Summers? Tim Geithner? They were two of the individuals who were part and parcel of the oligarchy, and were among those responsible for creating the situation that many of us had worked so damn hard to change. I knew then that it was over, and all my work and effort had been for nothing. There would be no major changes in Washington, the oligarchy would remain very much in charge, and “change you can believe in” would become change you would hardly notice. Even before the inauguration, Obama became the face of the looters, as most, if not all of his subsequent appointments were good “corporation” men, largely from the Clinton and, unbelievably, also the Bush administration! Men who had been responsible for the Glass-Steigall act which undid the banking reforms put in place during the great depression, and unleashed the forces which made the crash of 2008 possible; men who were not interested in pursuing the war crimes of the Bush administration, and certainly opposed to ending either one of the illegal and immoral, but extremely profitable wars we were currently fighting.

Obama’s lack of leadership, leading to the passage of a “stimulus” bill that had little chance of stimulating anything other than the income of Wall Street was the final straw for us. It was obvious that the United States was rapidly going to become a country that we couldn’t afford to live in. Our savings was pretty much gone, as we ended-up with three rental houses we couldn’t sell when the real estate market crashed, our investments and IRA’s had vanished, as had many other’s into the pockets of unregulated Wall Street speculators, and we had no health insurance, as I had a major heart attack in 1999, and was, for all practical purposes, un-insurable.

After investigating several areas in different countries, we visited Ajijic, Mexico in February of 2009, and absolutely fell in love with the place. Who wouldn’t? It has a perfect climate, friendly people, a huge expat community, low cost-of-living, and best of all, the area is nearly self-sustaining. We returned and put our home on the market in the midst of the biggest real estate downturn in the area’s history. While we waited, we watched the health-care debacle, beginning with the “no single payer” deal Obama cut with the oligarchy before negotiations even started in the Congress. I’m sick-and-tired of hearing from Obama supporters that what we ended-up with was the best he could get. That’s bullshit! After campaigning on single-payer, the man didn’t even try! He left Democratic Senators twisting in the wind while he knuckled-under to the insurance companies and big Pharma, who together, not only dictated the terms, they wrote the damn bill!

In spite of all Obama’s big words, and tough talk, the looters remained completely and utterly in control. They fostered, encouraged, and funded the teahadists, who performed just as they were supposed to, keeping the focus off the oligarchy, and on the administration. It didn’t take a crystal ball to see where the country was headed, as divided as it was, with so many distractions, all designed to keep us from discovering who was behind the curtain. I just wanted to sell and get the hell out while we could still afford to move, and finally, our house sold in the spring of 2010, and we moved as quickly as possible.

Why did we do it? I think the best way to answer that is to address some of the objections we heard from friends and family when they discovered that we were really serious about the move.

1. “But it’s a dangerous third-world country!”  Really? And just how do you define “third world?” Corruption? There is just as much corruption in the United States, in fact, quite a bit more than I have encountered here in the past year, and for a hell-of-a-lot more money. Distribution of wealth? Yes, there is greater disparity of wealth here between rich and poor, but estimates are the U.S. will catch-up within five years at the current rate of wealth transfer upwards. Danger? Yes, there is a drug war going on to determine who has the rights to satisfy the U.S. illegal drug habit, but it’s 98% confined to the border areas. Our area has a much lower crime rate than the area we left, and most other U.S. cities.
2. “But your food and water supplies aren’t safe!” Nonsense! The U.S. FDA is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the food and drug companies as evidenced by this recent survey, and do the consumer little if any good at all. In many areas, Fracking, the process of removing natural gas from buried shale deposits, will render local water tables unusable, and in other areas, unrestrained industrial waste is destroying many aquifers. Most of what we eat (98% or so) is grown, raised, or caught within 50 miles of where we live. Everything from chicken to fish to various meat products is absolutely fresh, and contains no additives, preservatives, or things to make it “pretty.” We treat fruits and vegetables for fifteen minutes with a disinfectant, as you perhaps should do in the U.S. as well, to kill any bacteria or harmful microbes. Our tap water is purified by our whole-house purification system, as it is in most of the dwellings here. The Mexicans drink it unpurified with no ill effects, we just aren’t accustomed to the same microbes they are.
3. “Mexico is unstable, and on the brink of collapse!” This is really the most ridiculous of all! Mexico is unstable? The U.S. is already under the control of the corporate elite, and is on the brink of fascism. The U.S. dollar is hanging by a thread, the empire is crumbling, and the whole world knows it. It’s just a matter of time until the world switches the standard currency from the dollar to the currency of some country that isn’t trillions in debt that it can never repay. I am moving every dollar I can out of the U.S., and so are the majority of the other American expats living here. When (not if) the dollar collapses, our Social Security will be worth zilch, but we should have enough in Pesos by then to live for a bit until you up north finally wake-up and throw-off the yoke of the corporate oligarchy.
4. “You will have no health care down there” Another big joke! I had no health insurance for the last three years I lived in the States. I had a heart attack in 1999 that made me uninsurable. It cost over $100 to see our family doctor, and forget about a specialist. A major health problem would have sent us directly into bankruptcy, like it has so many others, and cost us everything we owned. Here in Mexico, we each have a major medical policy that covers us for most everything, and costs about $1,000/year for each of us. That’s less than Medicare part B. There are two state-of-the-art hospitals in Guadalajara, less than 40 minutes away, and it costs us about $16 to see our U.S.-trained family doctor. That’s not a co-pay either, that’s the full price. Our insurance doesn’t cover doctor visits or drugs, both are so cheap we all self-insure for that kind of thing.

Our lives are full! I interact on a regular basis with people who have written books, textbooks, even, on subjects I’m interested in. I get to learn from people who have lived and worked all over the world, not just the United States. I play softball twice-a-week, and several of the guys I play with have advanced degrees. People who end-up living here are not, typically, the kinds of people I would regularly run into up north. As a self-educated individual who has never spend time in academia, I simply wouldn’t have access to the types of people I meet here, nor would I be accepted by them. Here, we evaluate one-another by different criteria, letters after your name – or lack of them, simply doesn’t matter.

In addition, I have the satisfaction of feeling that I’m no longer supporting, or contributing to the looter-driven consumerism that has made a walking corpse out of the America I so revered when I was younger. I didn’t vote, nor did I take part in the last election. My choices were between a blue-dog Democrat – a member of the C-Street Family who didn’t vote for a single Obama initiative, and a “Young-gun” teahadist regressive who, according to two members of his squad, murdered two innocent Iraqis while serving there.

In my view, to participate in current U.S. politics is to support the corporate looters who control the system at all levels, either directly or through their brainwashed minions, from the local school boards to the Congress, Presidency and Supreme Court. I refuse to do this! I refuse to participate in a system rigged to loot the country and the world for the short-term benefit of the few at the expense of the many. I am “on strike,” as were the “heroes” of Rand’s magnum opus.

Many of my fellow expats call our beautiful little valley a “field of dreams.” I prefer to think of it as “Pete’s Gulch” – just for the symmetry of the thing.

We would hope they would be capable of weighing empirical, although sometimes conflicting current data, and have the ability to arrive at a conclusion through some form of rational analysis. After all, that’s the best we can really hope for in a fellow human being in the 21st century, that his or her decisions be based upon 21st century information.

We have a relatively new entry into the 2012 Presidential sweepstakes, although he’s hardly a surprise, and he already enjoys the benefit of a considerable, and quite rabid, following. He’s not a “stupid” man, although he espouses some really fringe political ideas that would, undoubtedly lead to direct fascism in the United States, to replace the Inverted Totalitarianism we are currently operating under. I like his foreign policy ideas, and also his position on legalizing drugs, but my admiration for the man stops there. He is a committed theocrat, and a creationist, of all things!

I have debated many creationists, by and large, they are not “stupid” people. They have managed to somehow ignore 150 years of hard, corroborating, scientific evidence from many different disciplines, from Geology to Paleontology, and from Biology to Astronomy and Physics in order to accept the “divine” word of a group of wandering bronze-age nomads. There is nothing to explain acceptance of creationism other than willful ignorance of 21st century science, and Ron Paul has chosen that path.

This is not something that can be ignored or glossed-over in our highly-complex, technological age, where almost every problem we face, as a nation and as a world, has it’s roots in science, not superstition. So far as I know, the entire Republican field, so far, are all creationists, or say they are to pander to the base of the party. To even consider electing one of these “willfully ignorant” candidates would make us even more of a laughing-stock in the eyes of the world. And, laughing the hardest would be the CEO’s of our largest banks and corporations whose goal is to create a nation of uneducated, highly religious, docile, morons to provide a cheap supply of labor for the next few generations. Ron Paul would lead us into a Theocratic Idiocracy!

]]> http://pwsoderman.wordpress.com/2011/05/17/willful-ignorance/feed/ 0 pwsoderman http://pwsoderman.wordpress.com/2011/05/14/rainbow-pie-a-redneck-memoir/ http://pwsoderman.wordpress.com/2011/05/14/rainbow-pie-a-redneck-memoir/#comments Sat, 14 May 2011 19:37:27 +0000 Pete Soderman http://pwsoderman.wordpress.com/?p=415 Continue reading →]]> One of the reviews on Amazon suggested that “Rainbow Pie” should be required reading for all American schoolchildren, and I heartily agree. The picture Joe paints of what’s happened “his people” in the rural south applies to working men and women everywhere in America. Far from being only the family memoir I expected, RP is really a story of the corporate takeover of America from the point-of-view of the common working man and woman. There is essentially no difference between what has become of the world Joe describes around Winchester, VA, and the world I grew up in near New Haven, CT. In both cases, the good jobs are gone, both on the land and in the factories.

The chief difference between the two is that, while “Joe’s people” are clinging to their guns and religion to protect them from what they see as an overreaching government, mine, in the liberal north, are clinging to the faint hope that Obama, the magic-man is going to somehow save them from their own stupidity. Both ideas are equally divorced from reality. Joe writes about the American underclass, what made them that way, and how the sinking tide is lowering all boats, except for those one-or-two-percent who really have boats of their own. It’s no wonder the rural poor mistrust the government, it was government policies, forced by the Corporatocracy, that drove them off the land in the first place, only to be victimized by the deliberate destruction of the unions that kept wages high, again by government policies, forced by the same Corporatocracy.

Growing-up in the 50’s, I experienced the America Joe writes about, an America that’s unfortunately gone forever. When I graduated from High School, even the “D” students could read, and most could write a coherent paragraph. Companies had “personnel departments,” jobs were plentiful and well-paying, and you could buy things that lasted for a long time. Globalization, unfettered capitalism, and good old-fashioned greed and corruption has changed all that, and given us the America we have now. As Joe writes:

“The bottom line, however, is that they can’t read. Feel free to blame anyone you choose, except the free-market system’s extreme preference for dim-witted consumers and workers….

Ultimately, these kids will join the millions of adults who cannot read. And they cannot read because:  1. They do not have the necessary basic skills, and don’t give a rat’s ass about getting them; 2. Reading is not arresting enough to compete with the electronic stimulation in which their society is immersed; 3. They cannot envisage any possible advantage in reading, because the advantages stem from extended personal involvement, which they have never experienced, are conditioned away from, and is understandably beyond their comprehension; and 4. Their peers do not read as a serious matter, thereby socially reinforcing their early conclusion that it’s obviously not worth the time and effort.”

The renaming of “personnel” departments to “human resources,” sometime in the 70’s was actually a culmination of 60 years of efforts by corporations to put human workers in the same category, only different bins as nuts, bolts, and screws. To increase profits, corporations eliminated skilled positions and hired non-skilled workers at lower wages, even though they needed more of them to do the same jobs. This resulted in the production of cheaper goods that had to be replaced more often, leading to still more profits. Now, as goods and increasingly services are provided by offshore workers at still lower wages, the corporations don’t really need us very much at all. As Joe writes:

“Those consumers may have been stumbling instead of running down the store aisles of late, but recreational shopping is still a major driver of the US economy. Americans are still doing their bit to save the country, even if they hit the mall with only ten bucks to spend.

And why not? We’re talking about brand-new stuff here, folks – like the ‘improved’ iPhone and its must-haves for shoot-everything-that-moves apps for gamers’… The survival of American-style corporate capitalism depends on the public perception of such unending ‘newness’ and ‘improved must-haves’ to sustain abnormal market growth. To that end, it has buried us not only in junk, but also in junk efficiency, in the encrustation of ordinary goods with electronics – things designed to delight consumers by their novelty.”

Joe tells the story of his family, of course, within the backdrop of the last 60 years in the land of the free. For those not familiar with the “great white underclass,” some of what Joe describes may come as something of a shock – and that’s a good thing. As you read the stories of these “plain country folk,” realize that we are all heading down the same road, and they may have started at a lower level, but we will all eventually reach the same point – courtesy of the Corporatocracy that has us all in thrall. I know that wherever Joe may be, he would be thrilled if his last work served as a wake-up call for some of those who are, for whatever reason, ignorant of the present situation in which we find ourselves.

We lost Joe Bageant all too soon! I read a posting on his website some time ago, concerning a small Mexican village named Ajijic, where Joe was living. We began an email correspondence, and I was able to meet him when I moved here myself about a year ago. With his schedule and mine, we only had a brief time to get to know each other, but I feel we could have become friends. Here is a link to the introduction to “Rainbow Pie” on Joe’s web site. 

In the last post, I discussed my impressions of the current political situation in the United States. In this post, I will cover a bit of my own history, and how I, along with the entire atheist movement was influenced by the writings of Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, and Stenger, who became the vanguard of the “New Atheists.” I’ll talk a bit about the schism that has developed within the atheist movement that threatens what could be the only way out of the situation I discussed in the last post.

To begin with, before atheists and Humanists can do anything about anything, we first have to stop squabbling among ourselves, decide who we really are, what we really want, and how, exactly to go about it. The currently overwhelming opposition we’re facing, both from the religionists and the corporatists is directed, coherent, purposed, and focused. We must be the same, and we are nowhere near being there.

Indeed, we are far better off than we would have been prior to 2004 (the publication of “End of Faith,”) in that we are much better aware of our numbers, and are far more organized, but we are also deeply divided as to how we should deal with the religious, and like the Tea Party, we are squabbling over the wrong enemy. The various Tea Party groups disagree over how to attack the government, when the government isn’t the problem, just as we are squabbling over how to deal with the religious when the religious aren’t the problem! The real problem is the Corporatocracy that’s responsible for creating the divisions between most Americans in the first place.

Unfortunately, we can’t blame them for the divisions between atheists, we did that to ourselves, and we can fix it ourselves by re-focusing on the true problem, not the artificial one we have created. Before I discuss that, perhaps I should take a few minutes and explain what I’m talking about, for those of you who aren’t aware of the deep schism in the current atheist community.

I think my attitude towards religious faith was fairly typical of many of us, prior to the publication of EOF. I made a conscious decision, as a fairly young person, that there was no compelling evidence for the existence of the supernatural and certainly none for the existence of the Christian god in particular. For me, this wasn’t a “feeling,” or “belief,” but a cognitive decision based upon a careful appraisal of available information gleaned from both religious and non-religious sources. I agreed with Clarence Darrow, who said: “I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose.” That was over 45 years ago, and nothing I’ve learned since has changed my position in the slightest.

I grew up in the 50’s, when we were all taught to respect each others religious beliefs, no matter how silly they seemed, because, we were told, “faith” was something that was beyond questioning, something that could not be challenged nor denigrated under any circumstances, and, like politics, was outside the realm of things that were eligible for debate. I still wonder how the Jewish kids in class felt when they had to sit with bowed heads while the rest of us recited the Lord ’s Prayer in class each morning, led by a government employee.

I never though much about religion in the years after that, I allowed both of my kids to be baptized in my parent’s church, the one I grew up in, because I saw no harm in it, and I participated in various religious rituals when called upon to do so, which was as  seldom as I could possibly make it. In the 70’s, I joined the Masons, as a means to perhaps finally develop a relationship with my father, and even rose through the chairs to become Master of my Lodge in 1983. The Masons, of course, is a quasi-religious organization, but that didn’t bother me much, as I, agreeing with Thomas Jefferson, felt it neither picked my pocket nor broke my leg. By the way, the “G” in the Masonic symbol doesn’t stand for God, it stands for geometry, and I could deal with that just fine.

I left Connecticut in 1992, moving here to Wilmington, into a different world as far as religion was concerned. I don’t recall ever being asked in Connecticut what church I belonged to, but here, it was a common beginning to almost every conversation I had. I was already an atheist in AA, not a comfortable position to begin with, and it was made even less so when the beginning of many conversations was also the end when I would answer the question saying I just wasn’t a religious person. Still, I made as few waves as possible, as I was trying to start a business, establish some roots, and build relationships outside of the normal means that most people use to do that in this culture.

I became increasingly unhappy over the degree of what I considered willful ignorance among the people here, especially over matters concerning evolutionary science, or any kind of science, for that matter. I knew their beliefs were derived from religion, but I still felt they were rather harmless. I wrote a couple of letters-to-the-editor, which led to some polite correspondence with some creationists, bringing the fact home to me that these people really and truly believed the earth was less then ten-thousand years old. I saw that they not only took this nonsense in Genesis seriously, they were actually acting upon it!

Battles were erupting in school boards all over the country as Christians were trying to force creationism, and it’s offspring “Intelligent” design to be taught alongside real science. Of course, all such efforts were squelched by the courts, or by the threat of legal action, but the outgrowth of their efforts were fruitful in that even today, in spite of the law, if evolution is taught at all, it’s covered in a perfunctory manner, not as the foundation of Biology, which it is.

I became involved in these battles, but the real game-changer for me was the publication of “End of Faith” by Sam Harris in late 2004. In questioning and debating creationism, I had been, for the first time, challenging a religious belief, something I had considered a strong taboo for years, and Sam Harris not only encouraged challenging religious belief, he consider such challenges absolutely essential for the survival of civilization.

The first part of Sam’s major premise in EOF, simply stated, was that the social acceptance of belief in nonsense without evidence, or in the face of insurmountable contrary evidence, was the greatest challenge faced by mankind, and he wasn’t just thinking about Islam, either. His second major point was that the so-called “moderates” in any religious group were every bit as dangerous, if not more so than the extremists, because being more numerous, they perpetuated the social acceptance of religious belief. Without the moderates to provide this base of social acceptance, the extremists wouldn’t have a religion to hide behind, whether Moslem or Christian.

Books by Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Victor Stenger quickly followed, all published by major publishing houses, as Sam’s had been. In the past, works with an atheist theme had always been published by minor specialty houses, and received only minor notice, but these books sold in the millions of copies, establishing a market for non-theist works, and for the first time, catching the attention of popular theist writers.

These weren’t purely philosophical works apologetically professing a mildly atheistic position, these were strident calls for challenge and change with titles like the aforementioned “End of Faith,” along with “The God Delusion,” “Breaking the Spell,” God is Not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything,” and “God, the Failed Hypothesis.” These books were read by millions, and led many to question religious belief, and, more importantly, for the first time in this country, to question respect for it! Atheist’s aren’t joiners, for the most part, but the ranks of non-theist organizations like “The Freedom From Religion Foundation,” American Atheists,” and others swelled with those who wanted to do something about the problems pointed out by these “New Atheists,” as they were called in the November 2006 issue of “Wired” magazine.

Let me pause here for a bit of definition. Being an “Atheist,” even a “New Atheist,” does not require, nor does it imply an absolute certitude concerning the non-existence of the supernatural. We leave certitude to the religious, and are content with definitions such as that expressed by Richard Dawkins in “The God Delusion:” “Very low probability, but short of zero…. I cannot know for certain but I think that God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there;” or that by Isaac Asimov: “…No, I’m not sure, but I’m sure enough that I don’t waste any more time thinking about it!”

The New Atheists write mainly from a scientific prospective, feeling that the “God hypothesis” is a valid scientific hypothesis, having effects in the real world and can therefore be tested by scientific means. Previous writers, such as the noted Evolutionary Biologist, Stephen J. Gould, considered science and religion as belonging to separate “Non-Overlapping Magisteria” (NOMA), and science should be restricted to the empirical realm, including theories developed to describe observations, while religion would deal with questions of ultimate meaning and moral value.

New Atheism contends that religion does not consider itself a mere philosophy, as Gould would have us believe, but it deals with truth statements about reality that are, indeed, scientifically testable. Religious claims, such as the virgin birth of Jesus, the existence of the soul and an afterlife, and the power of prayer are all truth claims in the real world. Even morals, which involve human behavior, are an observable phenomenon that can be studied; in fact there is a substantial body of research on the evolutionary origins of ethics and morals. Nowhere, the New Atheists argue is it necessary to introduce God or the supernatural to understand reality. Many New Atheists argue that “absence of evidence is evidence of absence” when evidence should be present and is not.

Although these positions were not “new,” atheists had been writing on these subjects throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries, this was the first time these views had been mainstreamed by being published in best-selling books from major publishers, and they drew a lot of heat from both the religious and the atheist community. The criticism from the religious side amounted to “how dare they?” Seems they could tolerate a little non-belief as long as it was in the closet, out of sight, and didn’t openly take issue with the foundations of religious belief. Somewhat ironic, considering the often-bloody history of religious enforcement of their own belief systems on sometimes reluctant populations, and the zeal with which they advance their own dogma.

From the atheist side, the New Atheists were criticized as being as dogmatic, intolerant, and being the secular version of the fundamentalists on the religious right. The New Atheist position that there was no “common ground” to be found between science and religion was an impediment to organizations like the National Center for Science Education who worked with moderate mainstream Christian groups to achieve common ends, such as keeping the teaching of creationism out of public school systems. Authors such as Chris Mooney (“Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future”) and Barbara Forrest (Creationism’s Trojan Horse, the Wedge of Intelligent Design”) among many others, criticized New Atheists, especially popular bloggers such as Jerry Coyne and PZ Meyers for alienating moderate Christians, and making it more difficult to work with them.

The term “Accommodationist” came to be used, to refer to those who objected to the position taken by the New Atheists, who saw no advantage in working with the moderate Christians, and feel that atheists should direct their efforts towards the elimination of religion itself, as they see that as the best solution to the problem. The following is a quote from Jerry Coyne:

“There is … a strong negative correlation among countries between acceptance of Darwin and belief in God.  Countries with high belief in God, like Turkey and the US, have low acceptance of Darwinism. Countries like France, Sweden, and Denmark, which have high acceptance of Darwin, are not very religious.  Too, there is an obvious relationship between learning evolution and losing one’s faith.  All of this leads me to believe that the real problem with evolution in this country is not creationists, but religion.  You can have religion without creationism, but you never see creationism without religion.  I think, then, that we will only win this war by either vanquishing religion or waiting for it to disappear in the US, as it has in Europe.  There is real room for a discussion on tactics here, but Mooney and Forrest refuse to engage.  They’re just too fond of religion, apparently having what Daniel Dennett calls a “belief in belief.””

And so it goes! Another point Coyne makes is that: “Accommodationists like Forrest and the National Center for Science Education have been using the “let’s-make-nice-to-the-faithful” strategy for several decades.  What is the result? … American acceptance of evolution has stayed exactly where it is for 25 years.  The strategy is not changing minds.”

It’s interesting to me that the New Atheists are called “militant,” “uncompromising,” and “intolerant” for merely taking a firm stand on scientific principles as we understand them. Jesus was born of a virgin and rose from the dead, or he did not, these are clearly questions that can be addressed by science, and in my mind, insisting that this is so is not an “uncompromising” position, it is simply reality. I make no secret of where I stand on this issue, I believe that we should all be working towards the elimination of belief in the supernatural, and I think the polls clearly show that we’re certainly on that track. In the last seven years since the publication of EOF, the percentage of non-believers has increased from around 5% to nearly 20%, with the largest growth occurring within the under-thirty group. Churches of every denomination are losing membership, and it’s the younger generation that’s fleeing in ever greater numbers. Some polls claim that the percentage of non-believers under thirty may approach 35%, depending upon how the questions are asked.

It’s impossible to quantify the effect the New Atheists have had upon these numbers, were most of these people already non-believers and felt free to “come out of the closet,” or is there some persuasion going on. Personally, having spent a good deal of time on various forums and boards in the last seven years, I think it’s a combination of both. Had Harris, Dawkins, and the rest not written, I don’t think we would have established the large atheist population that we have, and we certainly wouldn’t have put ourselves in the position where we could, if united, become a real force in overcoming the problems we face in this country right now.

In 2008, Chris Hedges, the author I mentioned in the first part of this paper (“Death of the Liberal Class”) wrote a book called “I Don’t Believe in Atheists.” Chris, a self-admitted moderate Christian excoriated both groups of atheists, especially the New Atheists, calling them secular versions of the religious right. However, like the New Atheists he is disgusted with the Christian right, going so far as to call it the most frightening mass movement in American history. Even more disturbing for Hedges, however, is the notion which many atheists and liberal churchgoers share, that as a species, humanity can progress morally. There is nothing in human nature or human history to support that idea, Hedges maintains, nor that the flaws of human nature will ever be overcome.

If Hedges is right, if we can’t progress morally as a species, or overcome the flaws of human nature, we are helpless before the corporate oligarchy that hopes to rule us through fear, intimidation, ignorance, and superstition. I am convinced, however, that Hedges is wrong, and there is yet a way out of the situation we seem to have placed ourselves in. I believe it lies with the replacement of superstition with the principles of Humanism, and a discussion of that will be the subject of the last section of this paper.

As most of you know, we left this area a year ago, and moved to a quiet little village in Mexico, on the North shore of Mexico’s largest lake, just 40 minutes south of Guadalajara. We live very simply, even in comparison with our fellow expats, as, unlike most of them, we have no vehicle and no TV. We walk everywhere we go, and our entertainment consists mostly of movies, and, during the season, live baseball streamed on the internet. We occasionally watch streamed news broadcasts from the states, and I keep-up with events by monitoring a steadily decreasing number of web sites.

The number of sites I monitor is decreasing for a couple of reasons: One, I am becoming less and less interested in what’s going on up there, and two, as more and more sites are acquired by larger and larger organizations, the truth of what’s happening in the country is becoming increasingly more obscured, and it was pretty damn obscure to begin with. Remove yourself from day-to-day immersion in the culture of the United States for a year, and the big picture becomes much clearer, even to the casual observer.

One of my friends here is a writer named Joe Bageant, who describes Americans’ as living in a media-created “hologram,” and I think that Joe is exactly right! Most of you are living in a world that you create for yourselves, choosing what you would like to believe, or what you would like to be true, from the available information pool, and either completely ignoring or discounting whatever you do not choose to believe is true. I say the hologram is media created because somewhere along the line, the media, and by that I mean all forms of media, seemingly became disinterested in and detached from empirical truth. Some outlets, mostly the conventional print and “mainstream” broadcast media, dedicated themselves to “balance” Rather than make truth or value judgments concerning the stories they were running, they chose to give the same credence to both sides of any controversial issue, often equating actual empirical evidence with unqualified opinion, and giving both equal time and weight. For a good explanation as to how this began and why, see this excellent piece.

A portion of the media, some broadcast, most cable, virtually all AM radio, and a good many internet sites, chose to develop a particular constituency, and preach only the dogma their particular constituency already agreed with, totally ignoring truth, or even balance. Left or right, conservative or liberal, both sides bend, twist, fabricate, and obfuscate the truth, so the faithful, of whatever persuasion, have plenty of material from which to choose their own unique versions of reality. Of course, you think that your version, whatever that may be, is true and if you are one of those who actually care if their version of reality is true, you have piles and piles of data that prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the validity of your position. Guess what? So do the other guys! The entire political and social spectrum has been placed in the same “no rational discussion zone” that once was occupied solely by the creation/evolution and religion/atheism debates.

We have seldom been more divided as a nation as we are today. What the media has done, and done purposely, is deprive us of any rational basis to discuss any of the issues facing us. We can’t have a meaningful dialog on climate change, for instance, because half the country has been convinced that global warming is nothing but a hoax being perpetrated by socialists who want only to bring about the complete decimation of the world’s economy. Speaking of the economy, we can’t have a meaningful discussion about the dismal situation in this country because again, half the country thinks austerity and low taxes is the way to go, while the other half is convinced that the government needs to raise taxes, especially on those who can most afford it, and stimulate the economy. Corporate profits have never been higher, the stock market is doing great, Wall Street has made a full recovery, but the other 98% of Americans’ seem to be barely holding on, and yet there is no public outrage – at least not yet, and no discussion.

As I write this, the situation in Wisconsin is still not resolved, but in my estimation it doesn’t matter much in the long run how it’s finally resolved, the trend is very clear. One thing Wisconsin has done is expose, at least to those paying attention, who, or at least what is behind the divisiveness in America, and what their eventual aims are. The Koch brothers are an easy and available target right now, but even though they are major funding sources for much of the right-wing and Libertarian establishment (the Heritage Foundation and the CATO Institute were both founded by the Koch’s), they are only the tip of the iceberg.

The good news is that some Americans are starting to “get it.” Several books have hit the streets in the last several months written by some of our better remaining journalists, who are screaming at the top of their lungs, in an attempt to wake the rest of us up to the corporate takeover of the Congress, the Presidency, and almost the entire media structure. “Griftopia…” By Matt Taibbi; “Democracy Incorporated” by Sheldon S. Wolin; “Death of the Liberal Class” by Chris Hedges; “The Mendacity of Hope:…” by Roger Hodge; and especially Winner-Take-All Politics” by Jacob S. Hacker and  Paul Pierson, all tell, in different ways, of an America whose direction can no longer be influenced by the voters who are misled by the media into believing they are still in charge. We have a government by and for the moneyed interests, not only in this country, but in the world at large. As Sheldon S. Wolin pointed-out so well in “Democracy Incorporated,” we are living under a system most accurately described as “Inverted Totalitarianism.” Without firing a shot, or changing a single word in the Constitution, the American system has been completely hijacked by our largest corporations operating blindly in pursuit of profits to the exclusion of all other concerns.

Let me be clear, I’m not saying this is a conspiracy; it’s the result of a number of large corporations, each with armies of lobbyists, working towards a common goal. Perhaps there’s a degree of collusion among them, but I’m not alleging that there is. So, what are these common goals, what can we learn from the events of the last two years? Obviously, they want us as divided as possible, that’s why so many of them fund “Astroturf” groups like the Tea Parties, and others. Obviously, they want as little government regulation as possible, and as little oversight of their activities as they can get away with, and that’s why they fund operations like the Heritage Group and the CATO institute, which advocate for small government and lack of control.

Now, they have opened-up a new front. The Republican Party has suddenly discovered the religious right, a group it has exploited, but to whom it has given very little satisfaction over the last twenty years. Social legislation has started to pop-up in State Legislatures and even the Congress all-of-a-sudden. Issues that have lain dormant for years, like school vouchers, for instance, are suddenly center-stage. Seems it’s not enough to kill the educational unions, we have to replace the public school systems as well, and with Christian schools, who would love to get their hands on all that federal and state money. Bills legitimizing the teaching of creationism along with evolution have started to appear, as if by magic, in several states at once. Tighter abortion controls, some of them aiming to ban abortion and even contraception outright, have recently appeared in several states.

But, but, most of these measures are clearly unconstitutional, aren’t they? Well, the Constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is, isn’t it? What do you think are the chances the current court will strike any of this down? The Citizens United decision by this court opened the floodgates, and destroyed, perhaps forever, the ability of ordinary citizens ot the United States to have any influence over what our government does, or how it operates.

The idea that the Republican party is all-of-a-sudden concerned about the social goals of a group of constituents they really don’t need to appease any longer is ludicrous. What we should consider, is how the oligarchy would benefit if some of this social legislation became law. First, and most importantly, they would further divide us as a people. To left versus right, Republican versus Democrat, would be added Religious versus Non-religious. Yes, it exists now, but it would be far, far worse if some of these bills actually passed.

The more religious or committed to dogma a group is, the better they accept an authoritarian form of government. Every despot since Constantine has recognized and exploited that simple fact. Hitler and Stalin are both excellent examples (Stalin of dogma, and Hitler of both dogma and religion), as are most of the medieval rulers, and some (if there are any still left) of the rulers in the Middle East today. Could it be, as some are beginning to think, that the bottom line of all this attempted social engineering is to provide an uneducated, highly religious, docile, cheap supply of labor for the next few generations?  Do they want a population willing to work twelve hours a day, six days a week, from age twelve to age seventy, hoping for its reward in a mythical afterlife? We already had that, we called it the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

It’s obvious that the ruling class in this country have been quite successful in convincing a significant portion of the population that it is in their best interests to oppose unions, oppose fair taxation on the rich, oppose single-payer health care, and support the dismantling of the American educational system. Can it be that now the ruling class has decided that it is time for another religious great awakening? Are they trying to create a theocratic idiocracy?

I think they are, and in the next section of this paper, I’ll discuss what we as atheists and Humanists can do about it.

If some modern “Rip Van Winkle” went to sleep two years ago, just after I made my last presentation to you on the “Christian Nation” question, what do you think would be their impression of the world we wake up to now? All that “hopey, changey” stuff is long gone, for most of us, replaced with fear, outrage, and uncertainty. Not only in the halls of Congress, but in State Houses all over the country, it seems that the bulwarks of democracy are being torn down, and with them, our First Amendment protections are being stripped by politicians eager to pander to their right-wing religious base.

Or are they? Who is it they are really pandering to? Is it the Religious Right, or is the Corporate Oligarchy who put them where they are, and does it make a difference as far as we’re concerned as Humanists? When you’re on the rack, does it matter who’s turning the screw and why? I would like to investigate the possibility that what’s going on in Congress and in the various States, is nothing but another diversion, as was the Astroturf, big business-funded “Tea Party,” designed to further divide us as Americans, and make us less likely to unite against those who would steal our remaining liberties.

I would like to discuss what we, as Humanists, can do to counter some of these efforts, given that there are two factors that can weigh quite heavily in our influence in the outcome of this struggle. Firstly, polls show that our numbers are growing almost exponentially, especially among those under thirty, the next generation, and we should be taking advantage of this growth, by spreading the Humanist message through every means possible. Secondly, our message is one of inclusion, not exclusion; of harmony, not divisiveness; and, most importantly, of reason and evidence, not fear and delusion.

If there IS a solution to the multiple problems we face as a species, from global warming to dwindling resources, it’s not to be found in maximizing corporate profits, finding Jesus, destroying the middle class while enriching the top 1%, or any of the other directions in which we seem to be headed. In my opinion, the solution lies in the principles of Humanism, and in our ability to disseminate them to the widest possible audience in the shortest possible time. In fact, I believe it is our ONLY possible solution.

Beginning with a brief introduction and overview of the American political situation, I’ll continue with a discussion of present and growing rift between what’s referred to as the “New Atheist” community and the rest of the various types of non-believers which is beginning to make it very difficult for us to all work together towards what should be common goals. What is an Atheist? What is an Agnostic, and is there such a thing anymore? Who are these pushy, in-your-face “New Atheists,” where did they come from and what do they want? Who are these people the new atheists call “Accommodationists,” and where do they fit? In the end, does it really matter what we call ourselves, and do all of these different “categories” of non-believers fit under the Humanist umbrella?

Given the seriousness of our problems on this planet, can we find a way to work together for the betterment of the human race? I think this is an important question, and one that we need to carefully consider no matter how we view the world, or how we think of ourselves. The world is going to become even a more dangerous place over the next generation then it is now. There will be energy shortages, food shortages, and massive relocations due to the effects of climate change.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the corporate oligarchy we’re living under wants to turn at least this nation, if not the entire world, into a theocratic idiocracy, why else would they be funding the attacks on education at all levels, and the sudden surge of social issue legislation? The more religious a population, the better they respond to autocracy, as every ruler since Charlemagne has recognized and exploited.

This talk is about exploring a Humanist antidote, or at least mitigation of these possibilities, and proposing means by which the entire non-theist community can learn to work together.

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Pete Soderman was an early member of the Humanists and Freethinkers of Cape Fear, a several-time board member, former Vice President, and has presented before the group on two prior occasions. He is a student of Humanism, and well-versed in Constitutional principles, Religious origins (especially Christian), and U.S. Politics. He currently makes his home in Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico, on the Northern shore of Lake Chapala, and is working on a book about recovery from addiction. http://powerlessnolonger.com

Chapter One: “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover;” is an overview of “Powerless No Longer” (PNL), detailing why I’m writing the book, who it’s for, offering an “intro to addiction,” and suggesting how to use the book, depending upon what your goals are. PNL can be read in order, or used as a toolbox. Some of those reading the book will have only begun thinking of making a change, while others will be deeply committed to change and looking for a viable pathway. Still others will already be far along their own pathway, and merely looking for a few tools and suggestions. This chapter will hopefully sort things out.

Chapter Two: “Complex Causes for a Complex Problem;” will primarily address the biological and physical aspects of addiction, the actual mechanism that makes us addicts. Addiction is a Bio-Psycho-Social malady, and this chapter addresses the first, and part of the second of these three components. The study of addictive behavior crosses several disciplines, including behavioral neuroscience, epidemiology, genetics, molecular biology, pharmacology, psychology, psychiatry and sociology. We are addicts due to very complex mechanisms, and some understanding of these mechanisms makes our actions, and our personalities, a little easier to understand.

Chapter Three: “The Monster in Your Head, and How It Enslaves You;” will continue with the study of addiction, but this time with emphasis on the psychological and sociological aspects. Why do we see the world the way we do? Why are those urges so strong, and where do they come from? We will find that our addictions hijack the primitive areas of our brains, and become entangled with our most fundamental drives, those of self-preservation (eat and avoid being eaten), and reproduction. The “gotta have its” we experience, emanate from our reptile brains, and this chapter discusses the implications of this, and how it effects our view of the world, and our behavior. If we know where these thoughts and feelings are coming from, we will be in a better position to understand and deal with them.

Chapter Four: “They Were Not Powerless, and Neither Are You;” will explore the concept of powerlessness, as inculcated by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), and most of the drug and alcohol treatment industry. Are we really powerless over our addictions? Do we really have to “turn them over” to some ephemeral power greater than ourselves? Have any studies been done that give an indication of the truth of this concept? Turns out that yes, there has been considerable work done, and over 80 studies in the last 40 years prove conclusively that 75%, or more, of all addicts recover on their own, without treatment centers or 12-step groups! We will examine several of the studies, including some which prove that some addicts, who formally met strict dependency criteria, had successful non-abstinent recoveries.

Chapter Five: “Harnessing the Power of Self-Change, Breaking the Chains;” discusses in detail the seven stages of change an addict passes through in order to affect change in themselves. Although all addicts don’t go through all of the stages, they are a good starting-point for a discussion on how any individual, including you, could go about the process of self-directed change. Some tools are introduced to illustrate what constitutes advancement from one stage to the next. For instance, studies indicate that the number one necessity for self-recovery is a cognitive decision that the disadvantages of using outweigh the advantages. In other words a process known as a “Cost/Benefit Analysis,” so this is introduced here as a tool to advance an addict from denial into a state of self-change motivation. Also mentioned in the chapter are four points that are common among those who’s self-change was referenced in Chapter Four, with a discussion of how these points relate to the stages of change.

Chapter Six:”Choosing Your Personal Pathway to Change;” is a detailed analysis of the various pathways for change available for you. Each of the four general choices: Without any help, with informal help, self-help groups, and professional help; each have multiple pathways included within them, and decision criteria which must be addressed by anyone wishing to recover. This chapter focuses upon the options, with emphasis upon the decision criteria themselves. The object is to help you decide what might work best for you, by giving you some guidance from studies and surveys that provide an idea of the kinds of things that are important in making this type of decision, depending upon your own feelings, beliefs, and grasp of your own situation. This chapter is a preamble to Chapter Seven, which covers the various recovery options in detail.

Chapter Seven: “Your Choices for Action, and How They Compare in the Real World;” discusses the main recovery options, beginning with quitting completely on your own, all the way through professional help and treatment centers. Special emphasis will be placed upon the most common self-help option, 12-step, with and without formal treatment, and SMART Recovery. Other self-help groups, LifeRing, and Moderation Management will also be discussed, as will some specialized treatment options. Some new studies will be presented, which address the effectiveness of the various options, especially 12-step, which has been around the longest, and has the most data available, of the self-help groups.

The object of this chapter, together with Chapter Six, is to provide some of the information you need to make a decision on your personal pathway for change, realizing that none of these pathways are mutually exclusive! My own pathway involved components of more than one of these options, including another one that I haven’t addressed yet – ZEN.

Chapter Eight: “Obtaining and Maintaining Your Motivation, and Controlling Urges;” concerns early recovery. In Chapter Five, I began the discussion of motivation, the single most important component of recovery from any addiction. It was the number one factor mentioned in every single survey and study that addressed self-recovery from drug, alcohol, or nicotine addiction. I address methods of obtaining the motivation to abstain if you don’t already have it, and how to maintain it, if you do.

Almost as important as motivation is the ability to control urges to use. These urges, no matter how irresistible they seem, need the conscious cooperation of our thinking brains in order for the drug to be made available and delivered. Your reptilian brain can’t get the car keys, drive down to the corner package store, and buy a bottle, it needs help. Your help! Your feelings drive your actions, while your thoughts control your feelings. You can change the way you think, which changes your feelings and your actions. There are many cognitive, and simple behavioral tools you can use to modify your thinking and control urges, and we will cover them here.

Chapter Nine: “Proven, Non-Magical Tools Designed for  Living in a Reality-Based World;” discusses how to live in the real world, with all of its frustrations, stressors, and fears without having to alter reality with drugs or alcohol. Due to permanent changes in the response of certain systems in the brain of the addict, we are more susceptible to stress than most others are. While these changes are not reversible, we can deal with the additional stress using some of the same tools we use to deal with urges. By changing our thinking, we can eliminate this additional stress, in fact almost any stress, thereby maintaining our mental balance, and our sense of perspective. Long before the adversities of the day begin to build the tensions that can eventually lead to an irrational decision to drink or use, we can manage and dispense with them by developing the ability to see them as they really are. The tools used to do this are suggested by the surveys in Chapter Four, and are today common psychiatric tools used by professionals in the treatment of many mental disorders, including substance abuse. We can learn to apply them in our own lives, and that’s the purpose of this chapter.

Chapter Ten: “A Realistic, Balanced Vision for You;” is a wrap-up, a review, and a discussion of obtaining lifestyle balance, the outlook and attitude that allows addicts such as ourselves to lead normal, happy lives without resorting to mind-altering substances. The process of reorientation from a focus on short-term goals, which is what we do when we are using, to a focus upon long-term goals has another name: It’s called “growing up,” which is something many of us never did. When we were using, we set lots of goals for ourselves, the only problem was, we never achieved any of them. Why? Well, there was always “something,” wasn’t there? There was always some short-term gratification that we allowed to come between a long-term goal we thought we really wanted to achieve, and what we knew we had to do to achieve it. Even if we knew the particular gratification would preclude the goal, it wouldn’t matter; we would take the short-term irrational path every time.

This chapter teaches the skills of balancing short and long-term goals and satisfactions in order to achieve a healthy balance in your life. Learning to set specific, achievable, measurable, realistic and timed goals is one of the most important life skills you can learn. With knowledge of the proper tools, anyone can balance their lives to achieve the maximum of personal joy and satisfaction, and you know what? It’s contagious!

I would really appreciate any suggestions you might have!  Thank you for your attention, and I promise to get back to this blog just as soon as I can.

If ever there was an election in the United States that didn’t matter a whit, it’s these rapidly-approaching mid-terms. The Republicans are enmeshed in internecine warfare between the so-called “old guard,” and the know-nothing wing of the party, while the Democrats are flailing about trying not to piss-off anyone, and finding instead that their pitiful efforts are succeeding in pissing-off everybody! The President (yes, we have one), is running around the country in an attempt to rally the same people he told a few months ago they were the one’s they had been waiting for, trying to convince them to turn-out in large numbers to re-elect the same jerks who couldn’t get it done in the last congress in spite of huge majorities.

In spite of a sixty-forty majority in the Senate, and an overwhelming majority in the House, from a progressive point-of-view, no meaningful legislation was passed! None! What managed to sneak through was so weak and watered-down that it was practically useless. Oh, sure, some minor changes were made in health care, but they will soon be overwhelmed and circumvented by the insurance companies who, after all, allowed their passage. No meaningful financial reform was adopted, Wall Street simply wouldn’t allow it, so what we got were a few new rules restricting the ability of the banks to jack-up credit card rates on a few of us, leaving the rest of the industry free to indulge in exactly the same risky behavior that caused the crash in the first place.

The polls vary a bit, but most seem to indicate that the Republicans will probably take over the House, and come within a couple of seats of taking over the Senate. There are even some who think there may be a chance of both houses falling under Republican control, either by their electing a sufficient number of Senators outright, or by either Senators Lieberman or Nelson switching parties, which they both may do anyway, if the Republicans win the Senate outright, to save their precious committee chairmanships.

It doesn’t really matter what the final outcome is, who ends-up controlling which chamber, or by how many votes. It doesn’t matter because the country has been ungovernable for the last eighteen-months, and that fact is not going to change regardless of the outcome in November! If the Democrats couldn’t govern effectively with the huge majorities they enjoyed in both houses, do you think things will somehow change when, at the very least, their majorities are much smaller? Do you think climate change legislation, labor unions, or any of the remaining “Obama socialist agenda” will fare better after the election? If so, what the hell’s the color of the sky in your world?

Look at the line-up of Republican candidates for the Senate and House. Every single one is a climate-change denier, many are theocrats, most are creationists, all are in thrall to the religious-right, and they all owe allegiance to the corporations and special interests that own and control this country. Of course, that last they share with the hapless Democrats, who are just as much in the pocket of big business. My point, though, is that after this election, no matter what the outcome, our government is going to take a giant lurch to the regressive right, and there will be virtually no hope of anything happening in Washington that will be of the slightest benefit to progressive causes.

The House will spend the next two years mired in investigations of what the Democrats have been trying to do the last eighteen-months. Acorn will come back into the headlines, even though they are now defunct, because even though they have been proved innocent of each and every charge ever made against them, they committed the unpardonable sin of working hard, all across the country, monitoring minimum wage law compliance, and trying to insure a living wage for all workers. “Climate-gate” will spring to the center of media consciousness in spite of it being yet another trumped-up “scandal,” because the right needs it to justify following the directives of big coal and big oil, to ignore the growing climate crisis, and do whatever’s necessary to continue burning fossil fuels, no matter what the cost to the environment.

Regardless of the make-up of the Congress after this election, Obama will continue his already apparent movement to the right, continuing to abandon those of us who worked to put him there, because the corporatocracy he works for will have it no other way. The real heart-breaker will come if Justice Ginsberg decides to retire in the next two years! Faced with a Senate that would never confirm even a centrist, in the mold of his last two appointments, Obama would have to nominate someone acceptable to the religious right, the tea party, and the few centrist Democrats left in the Senate. Good luck with church/state separation, gay rights, abortion, and other liberal causes-the theocrats would have five solid votes.

These outcomes are not based upon worse-case election scenarios, but upon what is most likely to occur at the polls next month. According to Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight, the Republicans have almost a 70% chance of taking control of the House, and there are few undecided voters, and not a lot of time. Sensing a big victory, corporations unleashed by “Citizens United” are pouring money into close races as never before.

What is there to do in the face of all this doom and gloom, when even an absolute best-case scenario has the Democrats barely holding majorities in both houses of Congress? Consider that to achieve even this modest goal would, at this late date, would require that we all mobilize to the same extent we did two years ago to elect this crew to begin with. I frankly don’t see that happening, not with all the disillusionment and despair floating around normally upbeat progressive websites.

What, then, is the best course to achieve a progressive outcome in the face of all this regression and negativity? Well, I have a suggestion, but it’s not going to be a popular one, ’cause it requires a long-term effort, and a considerable amount of pain, not to mention a great deal of risk.

All of the forces of the regressive right, including their media wing, have waged an extensive two-year-long campaign against the Obama administration that has been instrumental in placing them on the threshold of re-taking at least one house of Congress only a couple-of-years after one of the worse defeats in their history. Of course, most of what they’ve said and done has little to do with reality, from fascism to socialism, and from “deathers” to “birthers,” virtually everything coming from the right has been smoke, mirrors, lies, and distortions.

I’m not suggesting we do anything of the kind -we don’t have to! They are going to roll into office next year, and the first thing they’re going to do (if the Democrats don’t do it for them) is extend the Bush tax cuts. Let them! They are going to try to gut the social programs, including Medicare and Social Security. Let them! They are going to repeal as much of the new health care plan as they think they can sneak past Obama. Let them! They will probably double-down on Afghanistan, and may even force Obama into Iran. Let them! If they get control of the House, there is no doubt that they will investigate everything that moves, and some things that aren’t moving any longer at all, but we just have to let them!

I’m not saying “let them” as though we could stop them, because the time is long past where we could do that, I’m saying “let them” in the sense of giving them all the goddamn rope they could possibly want. America has had a good long dose of trickle down, and I guess it hasn’t quite sunk in yet what a horrible economic system it really is, but it will! It will, if we do what we need to do to see that its effects are really brought to the forefront of the American consciousness (assuming there really is such a thing).

Same thing with the health care plan. Several good features have already kicked-in, but few are aware of it. That’s all of our faults, and we need to fix that. Yeah, I know, that mandate is a bitch, and needs to go, and if the regressives decide to repeal it (doubtful they will, the insurance companies won’t let them), that would be a good thing. It will be interesting to see what happens if they try to pay for tax cuts by gutting social programs. It’s a kind of pure Libertarianism that the country hasn’t really seen before. We have to make sure they not only see the effects, but understand the causes as well!

Same goes with whatever else they do. We have to do the same things they have been doing for the past two years, holding rallies and marches, lawfully disrupting town hall meetings, writing letters, talking to our neighbors, starting and supporting local progressive groups, and, most of all, holding our local media’s feet to the fire to make damn sure that even the poorest-informed among us knows what’s going on and who’s behind it.

I’m not suggesting anyone sit out this election, far from it! Every progressive who’s elected over a tea party candidate mitigates the potential damage they can do. What I am suggesting is that we start looking past this election, making plans and putting mechanisms in place to deal with the regressive fallout, and prepare for 2012, which is truly a make-or-break election. I don’t think it’s too soon to begin the process of looking for progressive candidates for that election, from the top to the bottom of the ticket.

The anti-incumbent backlash we are seeing in this mid-term, having much of its roots in lies and mis-information, should be nothing compared to the revulsion that should be the result of even two years of regressive right-wing Libertarian politics. It’s up to us to be in a position to take advantage of what could be the best opportunity we’ve ever had to elect a progressive government, one not beholden to the corporate and financial structure as both party’s are today.